“Every Love Story is a Ghost Story”: The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of Dog (2015)

While it has been described as “a paean to a canine friend”, “a meditation on love and loss” and a collection of “eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the limitations of language and storytelling”, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2016) can also be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson’s idiosyncratic multi-media technique (foregrounding technology) and conceptualizing of the future, this chapter will explore the ways in which the figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark and the Bardo course through Heart of a Dog. Exploring the implications of the juxtaposition of these themes and Anderson’s oeuvre including her live performance work and the Downtown New York artistic milieu she emerged from, Williams positions the film in relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as a particular rendering of twenty-first century subjectivity.